Something attracted Doris Bittar to that cluttered North Park storefront on 30th Street.

But she didn’t really know what until some of her potential neighbors starting asking about her plans.

“I said, I’m an artist and I need more studio space,” Bittar explained. “Then I just started making it up while I was talking.”

She’d also have an art gallery — a serious art gallery — in the front. And she’d sell flowers; not just any flowers, protea flowers.

“I sounded like I was lying,” she said. “You know that Jon Lovitz character on ‘Saturday Night Live’? That’s what I felt like, to be honest with you.”

But she was telling the truth. And the truth is her 7-month-old Protea Gallery, just south of The Linkery on 30th, is quietly becoming a North Park staple.

Bittar, who was born in Baghdad to Lebanese parents and moved to New York at an early age, has been a San Diego resident for nearly three decades. A graduate of UC San Diego, she teaches at Cal State San Marcos, writes, has her own studio practice and exhibits her art internationally.

That’s not your typical art-world crowd, but Bittar’s concerns are not really with the art world.

“I’m a little frustrated with San Diego in terms of the conversation that’s out there,” she said. “Maybe it’s not just San Diego. I was feeling there was something lacking.”

The discussion seemed to bypass women, and men, whose art dealt with aspects of the global political situation, “artists whose voices you don’t normally hear, and whose work you don’t normally see.”

Over the years, she’s developed strong connections with many of these artists, in part through her association with the Arab American National Museum in Michigan and other similar organizations.

She opened the gallery in December with “Textscapes” by Joyce Dallal, a Los Angeles-based artist of Jewish Iraqi heritage; exhibits by Andrew Courtney (“Guardians of the Mosque: African Palestinians of Jerusalem”) and the Madrid-based artist Noni Lazaga (who is collaborating with Bittar on a show in Beirut) soon followed.

Work by the Los Angeles artist Nouha Sinno is now on view through July 20.

“Having this gallery has given me kind of a renewed purpose,” Bittar said. Like some New York transplants, Bittar occasionally has the thought she’d like to return to the East Coast.

“I’m not thinking so much about leaving anymore,” she said. “I think we’re here for good; this is it.”